Signora Da Vinci by Robin Maxwell Read Free Book Online Page B

into a family of wealth and high position. The girl’s substantial dowry would serve to enrich her husband’s family’s coffers.
    Then Antonio da Vinci asked his son if he had deflowered the apothecary’s daughter. Piero had not attempted to deny it. His mother and grandmother had sniffed in disgust. The acknowledgment of my lost virginity had finalized the conversation.
    Suddenly Francesco looked down at his feet, loath to continue.
    “What did your father say?” I insisted.
    “That you were no better than a common prostitute. When Grandfather asked what Piero would do if he’d made you pregnant, Mother and Grandmother stood and left the room.”
    With those words my knees jellied. The thought of pregnancy had never entered my head. We were to be married. If there had been a child it was meant to be born legitimate. We were to be married!
    “Did he not fight for me?” I cried. “Even a little?”
    Francesco regarded me with pity. “I told you what they said, Caterina. How could my brother have fought for you?” Francesco shook his head. “He is heir to this greedy, self-serving family. He should have known better!”
    I remember little after that. There must have been moonlight, for even in the night I was able to make my way into the hills, stumbling as I went, caring nothing for my scraped knees and torn skirts. I wandered like a wraith up the river shore, collapsing in the shallows to weep, loudly cursing Piero and his miserable family, and finally and most viciously, cursing myself.
    How could I have been so stupid? I was a fourteen-year-old girl. No one in the village knew of my father’s honorable profession in the service of Poggio, who, in turn, had served Cosimo de’ Medici himself. No one knew Ernesto was anything more than a poor country herbalist. And even if Piero’s family had known of the vast treasure of books and manuscripts kept in my father’s study, it would have meant nothing. All that mattered to them was a fat dowry and a step up into Florentine society. None of that could I offer their son.
    And I was a whore at that.
    I lay on my back staring up at the stars. They seemed to mock me with their cold, distant sparkle, as if to say, “We haven’t a care for you, you poor worthless creature. Rule your own fate? See where it’s gotten you.”
    I cried for so long and so hard that I was altogether emptied, and fell into a dreamless sleep. I woke after dawn, damp all over, the shape of grass spikes gouged into the flesh of my cheek.
    I found my way back to the village, ignoring my neighbors, refusing to answer their cheerful hellos. At home I found my father frantic with worry, and Magdalena, relief having turned to annoyance, clucked disapprovingly at my disheveled appearance. Tongues would already be wagging, she scolded.
    I could not look my father in the eye. I pulled out of the fierce embrace in which I allowed him to hold me for only a moment before climbing the stairs to my room.
    Only later did I learn, or even care, that the fire in his sacred furnace had, for the first time since it had been lit, been allowed to burn down and die.

CHAPTER 3
    The day after I returned from Piero’s betrayal I drank great quantities of willow leaf tincture to prevent the joining of Piero’s seed with my own. I believed in its efficacy and that the vitriol coursing through my veins and surely engorging my organs would kill anything trying to live there and grow.
    In the following weeks I was silent in my rage, telling no one—not even my father—the source of it. Fury grew and festered into something sick and pustulent in the deepest part of me.
    I became openly irritable, ignored washing or brushing my hair, ate portions that would better suit a large man than a slender girl, and I grew fat and slovenly, my face crisscrossed with white-headed pimples. I lay abed every night obsessed with thoughts of Piero and his family, revenge I would take, even magic potions I would compound to recapture